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Collective Memory Discovered in Bacteria
- daveguy 11y agoMy daughter's suggestion: we should ally with the octopi.
- CamperBob2 11y agoOctopi are really interesting creatures. They're said to be about as smart as a three- to four-year-old human. The disturbing part is, that's how long they live. What would a hypothetical twenty-year-old octopus get up to?
- nkozyra 11y agoA twenty-year-old octopus would either be: Switching majors, chasing tentacle and hanging in the quad -or- Getting their first $1B valuation as cofounder of an octocorn
- vosper 11y agoCan't believe you went with "octocorn" when "unipus" was there for the taking :D
- karmajunkie 11y agoor "octoporn"?
- marak830 11y agoThank you i needed that laugh today :-)
- solipsism 11y agoYour question seems to imply their intelligence increases at the same rate as a human and keeps doing so until they die. That would be very strange if it were the case. I'm guessing they reach their maximum intelligence well before they die, and then they plateau, like most other animals. So living 20 years would make it more experienced but not able to apply to MIT.
- mitchty 11y agoDon't some octopus die young too? Around 3-4 years for certain species. Well not young but more their life span isn't that long.
- mitchty 11y agoOk don't get why I'm getting down voted but I did recall right at least: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Enteroctopus_dofleini#Lifespan_and_reproduction https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Enteroctopus_dofleini#Lifespan... 3-5 years and they're the longer lived octopus.
- deleted 11y ago[deleted]
- vansteen 11y agoSome scientists think they are quite intelligent animal and they can easily learn. The problem is they have to learn everything by themselves. I read that octopus doesn't transmit any knowledge from one generation to the next one. The mother put some eggs in a cave, protect them and then die once the babies hatch out.
- hathym 11y agoI am sure it is yours :p
- DoubleMalt 11y agoAs long as the storage mechanism is not explained, I'll assume a statistical fluke.
- James001 11y agoWhy? We discover many phenomenon that we don't have a mechanism of action for.
- DoubleMalt 11y agoCan you give an example? From a real science, not psychology or economy.
- tudorw 11y agoThis maybe http://io9.gizmodo.com/scientists-discover-a-new-link-between-the-brain-and-th-1710560159 http://io9.gizmodo.com/scientists-discover-a-new-link-betwee...
- gus_massa 11y agoIt's difficult to find an example that is not yet solved, but some discoveries had no good explanations for a time: LGM (Little green men): https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/LGM-1 https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/LGM-1 High temperature superconductivity: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/High-temperature_superconductivity#Possible_mechanism https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/High-temperature_superconducti... And depending of the details about what you consider an explanation, we can include gravity https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Graviton https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Graviton It probably involves a family of alleged particle that nobody had seen, but with a few approximations you will probably get General Relativity and with more approximations Newtonian Gravity. Anyway, why do gravitons interact with quarks?
- raattgift 11y agoI'll try to answer your last question ("why do gravitons interact with quarks") and the implicit one ("why hasn't anyone seen a graviton?") as well. You yourself are a pile of mostly quarks (and gluons) whose behaviour with respect to the surface of the Earth is extremely well described by General Relativity. There are plenty of large astrophysical objects which are mainly quarks-and-gluons and they follow General Relativity (GR) exactly. The non-gravitational behaviour of all these objects is (within measurability) exactly described by the Standard Model, and if we divide them up into constituent parts -- right down to subatomic particles -- the description remains accurate. The description of the gravitational behaviour of these objects should also continue as we divide them into ever smaller parts. Quarks feel all four fundamental forces, so they must interact with the respective force carriers. Gauge bosons are exchanged between elementary particles in a gauge theory (like the Standard Model), and carry the fundamental forces. Gravitons are directly comparable with photons, which mediate the other long range fundamental force; both should be massless because they are long-range. Classical light waves have spin-0 symmetry, and photons are spin-0; classical gravitational gravitational waves have spin-2 symmetry, so a quantization of them must preserve that. The simplest graviton extension to the Standard Model works very well when gravitational effects are weak, but fails when gravitational effects are strong, largely because gravitons are self-interacting (unlike photons, at least at tree level). This seen in classical theories: the Maxwell equations are linear; the Einstein Field Equations are not. Schrödinger's equation is linear; quantum gravitational equations almost certainly will not be. Weinberg's dimensional power counting of Feynman diagrams works for renormalizing field content described by Schrödinger's equation; that approach doesn't work for the gravitational field content for diagrams with more than one loop of gravitons. Directly detecting an individual graviton will be difficult; you're interacting with enormous numbers of gravitational waves (even more than the number of light waves you are interacting with), but unlike the photon, the individual effect of each graviton is too weak to detect with anything close to current technology. (see for example http://arxiv.org/abs/gr-qc/0601043 http://arxiv.org/abs/gr-qc/0601043 ) Finally, we might arrive at another theory of gravity that doesn't have gravitons, although that would be a surprising result.
- sitkack 11y agoApparently they have some sort of proof-of-work system going on.
- mozumder 11y agoSo have we discovered how memory is actually stored here? Also, how quickly can we implant new memories? I would like a nice ego trip to Mars.
- x5n1 11y agoEasy there McBain...
- DonHopkins 11y agoMaybe this is the mechanism behind homeopathic putrid water memory.
- journeeman 11y agoI wonder if there is some Sussman's Propagator model like biochemical process going on underneath, resulting in the collective memory.
- Terr_ 11y ago> salt stress causes a delay in cell division, leading to synchronization of cell cycles; secondly, survival probability depends on the individual bacterial cell's position in the cell cycle at the time of the second exposure. So basically you thwack all the cells with something that pushes their lifecycles towards a similar schedule, and then later-on they tend to all still be on the same cycle? Isn't that like saying two pendulums in the same house have a "collective memory" of an earthquake?
- _snydly 11y ago> So basically you thwack all the cells with something that pushes their lifecycles towards a similar schedule, and then later-on they tend to all still be on the same cycle? Yeah, that much is pretty well understood. http://journals.plos.org/plosgenetics/article?id=10.1371/journal.pgen.1000300 http://journals.plos.org/plosgenetics/article?id=10.1371/jou... > Isn't that like saying two pendulums in the same house have a "collective memory" of an earthquake? The important point isn't that there's memory (which seems pretty easy to explain), it's that it's collective. Using your analogy, it would be like finding that two pendulums in the same house have memory of an earthquake, but if there's only one pendulum then there's no memory. This result might be regulated by quorum sensing (https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Quorum_sensing https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Quorum_sensing). Like the pendulums are talking to each other.
- devishard 11y agoI think the point your parent comment is making is that "collective memory" implies more than just a common cause causing synchronization. If, as you say, "the pendulums are talking to each other" that would fit my definition of "collective memory", but if the pendulums stay synched just because they started at the same time, that doesn't seem like collective memory.
- rdtsc 11y ago> So basically you thwack all the cells with something that pushes their lifecycles towards a similar schedule, and then later-on they tend to all still be on the same cycle? Funny enough servers will do that as well. They will self synchronize and exhibit a thundering herd effect. They run the same software, power cuts our, or they get DoSed, maybe they restart, retry at the same schedule and so on.
- jacquesm 11y agoIt puts 'bacterial cultures' in a completely different light.
- fpoling 11y agoOn of the biggest unresolved issue in biology is to explain observed speed of evolution. Random mutations just cannot do it. Collective memory can be a part of the puzzle if it allows effective propagation of changes helping survival.
- nitrogen 11y agoI don't buy it; the Earth is really old, plenty of time for evolution to work by random mutations selected by environment.
- dandare 11y agoAbsolute age of life on Earth does not mean anything, it was just prokaryota 2/3 of the time. Compare it to age of Galapagos and Darwin's finches.
- nitrogen 11y ago1/3 of a really big number is still a really big number. Endosymbiosis conveys a significant advantage.
- varjag 11y agoMath for mutations leading to simultaneous advantageous traits doesn't seem to add up easily however: http://inference-review.com/article/haldanes-dilemma http://inference-review.com/article/haldanes-dilemma
- nitrogen 11y agoI don't have time to read the whole article, but the sections I did read seemed to draw conclusions from an untenable chain of unjustified simplifying assumptions.
- varjag 11y agoThey didn't to me, but then am not an evolutionary biologist. However, all natural sciences are simplified models approximating reality, the only question how much predictive force they can demonstrate. Either way, the article presents a better laid out theory than "it seems so to me".
- gchokov 11y agoOne can only wonder what collective memory might the more sophisticated species have (like Ants). Not sure why this whole thing reminds me about Azak Azimov - Foundation ..
- jefurii 11y agoAnts use stigmergy[0]. They lay down different pheremones in their environment as they walk. Intelligent behavior arises out of the combination of all these signals. Wikipedia, the law, and open source software are great examples of stigmergy in humans. [0] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Stigmergy https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Stigmergy
- gchokov 11y agoThanks for the reference. Definitely an interesting read. Knew about the pheromones, but not about Stigmergy.
- dschiptsov 11y agoIt is not a "memory". It might be merely a result of a selection pressure on population of bacteria.